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Sunday, 16 April 2017

‘Kim Jong Un ready for peace at the right price’ (Sunday Guardian)

By M D Nalapat

Any peace offer would need to include 100% guarantees of the safety of Kim, as well as of his governmental associates.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, North Korean
regime head Kim Jong Un represents a better chance for peace on the
divided Korean peninsula, than was the case under his grandfather and
father, both of whom ran the country before the start of his own period
in office. This is according to analysts in the troubled peninsula, who
claim to be personally aware of the thinking of the young supremo of the
Pyongyang regime. However, to incentivise Kim into making such a move,
“an attractive peace offer will need to be made”. The option to such a
move “would be war, as Kim is as ready to take to the battlefield as his
grandfather Kim Il Sung, whom he resembles in both appearance and
character”, according to these individuals. According to those familiar
with the thinking within higher level groups in North Korea, any peace
offer would need to include “100% guarantees of the safety of Kim, as
well as of his governmental associates, given the unhappy history in the
Middle East of promises made to leaders there (who were persuaded to
surrender their WMD stockpiles) being broken and they themselves getting
eliminated in a brutal manner”. Hanging in the case of Saddam Hussein
and death by torture for Muammar Gaddafi, with a similar fate being
sought by the regional allies of NATO for Bashar Assad. Such a guarantee
“would include the giving of a state position to Kim”, albeit of a
ceremonial sort, “that would protect his protocol privileges as a
national leader”. According to those who are familiar with the workings
of the North Korean governance mechanism, status and protocol will be
pre-dominant in any acceptance of a peaceful conclusion to the DPRK
nuclear issue. Hence, they add, “it needs to be at the level of the US
and the DPRK” and not any lesser power on the other side of the
negotiating table. They claim that “the intention of Supreme Leader Kim
is to make the territory of the DPRK as advanced as is the case south of
the 38th parallel” and that he has “steadily been loosening the
constraints on private industry” in the DPRK.

It needs to be added though that some analysts, based not elsewhere
in East Asia but in Beijing, are sceptical of claims that Kim Jong Un is
prepared for a peace settlement. They say that the “atmosphere of
mistrust and paranoia within the North Korean leadership makes it
impossible for them to be satisfied with guarantees that would entail
their giving up the security believed to be provided by possession of
WMD”, including a nuclear arsenal. However, others claim that Kim Jong
Un is an aficionado of what is described loosely in East Asia as “the
American way of life”, and that he “regularly listens to jazz and even
to country music”, while his personal tastes “often coincide with those
of the elite in neighbouring countries”.

Diplomats based in East Asia claim that the Korean Peninsula is
“closer to war” than at any time since the end of the 1950s war between
the US and China for control of the territory, a contest that ended in a
stalemate because of President Harry S. Truman’s refusal to use the
full range of US military power in order to unify Korea after it had
split into two separate countries. Boosted by clandestine assistance
from Pakistan, which itself has been given help in the nuclear field by
China, the regime of Kim Jong Un is within four years of developing both
a missile system, as well as a nuclear weapon capable of devastating
Seattle or San Francisco, and within seven years of a missile that can
reach New York, on the east coast of the US. Even the first is
intolerable for Washington, which is why a second Korean war has become
inevitable, unless North Korea voluntarily and verifiably disarms its
nuclear and missile arsenal. Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama have
each embraced the Atlanticist playbook on North Korea, which involves
the brandishing of both carrots and sticks that are puny in size.

The tiny carrots on intermittent offer to Pyongyang have been
derisory in scope, being mostly cosmetic in their potential effects on
the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea (DPRK), which is what
the Kim family calls its fiefdom. As for the sticks, these are mostly
related to financial punishments, it being an Atlanticist article of
faith that policymakers in countries outside the charmed circle of
Atlantic Alliance partners are, at the core, motivated entirely by
considerations of cash. It is, therefore, no surprise that each such
effort by the US and its allies to ensure that the DPRK disarm, has met
with failure. Since President Donald John Trump took office on 20
January 2017, there has been a change in policy, in that the carrots
have almost entirely disappeared, while the stick used to coerce the
regime into compliance is larger. The emphasis on the stick, rather than
the carrot, reflects the reality of President Trump’s diplomatic,
defence and national security picks being overwhelmingly Atlanticist
thus far, despite his own efforts during the 2016 campaign to embrace a
strategy more in line with the Indo-Pacific realities of the 21st
century.

An Indo-Pacific strategy would give the first priority to an effort
at changing North Korean behaviour by offering carrots of a size
sufficient to persuade Kim Jong Un to exchange his nuclear weapons and
missiles for an honourable and guaranteed future that would include the
unification of both halves of Korea into a single democratic entity.
What has been termed as a “Bright Sunshine” policy, would substantially
reward the present leadership of North Korea in order to persuade them
to agree to surrender their nuclear weapons and proceed towards a
political settlement that would end in unification. Should such a
generous peace initiative be rejected, “the public in South Korea, Japan
and the US would fully back kinetic action” against North Korea. During
the period of negotiations, “anti-missile defences would be boosted in
South Korea and Japan to the levels built up in Israel under the Iron
Dome system begun by Barack Obama. At the same time, intensive
intelligence operations would ensure a complete picture of the DPRK’s
military capabilities”, so that these can be taken out in a pre-emptive
strike, should the peace talks fail. The period of good faith
negotiations under a “Bright Sunshine” policy rubric would be
accompanied by co-ordination between the militaries of Japan, the US and
South Korea, while efforts would be made to persuade capitals such as
Hanoi, Manila and New Delhi to join in a pre-emptive strike, “because
North Korean nuclear and missile capabilities threaten them as well”.

Analysts linked to the South Korean military say that they have “the
force needed to devastate the defences of North Korea in a first
strike”, and that coordinated strikes by Japan, the Republic of Korea
(South Korea) and the US would succeed in ensuring that the offensive
weapons in the North Korean arsenal would be unable to do more than
“acceptable” damage to the RoK, most notably its capital, Seoul. This
they define as casualties below 5,000. They, however, admit that
casualties in North Korea will be “many times more”, and that a first
strike has to be of a level that is devastating enough to destroy almost
all its weaponry within an hour of launch, if casualties in South Korea
are to be held to the “acceptable” level of 5,000 or less, including
deaths of military personnel engaged in operations against the DPRK.

A question mark floats over Beijing’s response to any such highly
kinetic strike by the US and its allies. According to an analyst in
favour of elimination through military means of the North Korean
arsenal, “so long as a Zone of Quarantine is established along the
(Chinese) border, Beijing would likely leave the DPRK to its fate”,
especially if such an attack follows a period of diplomacy that would
offer a generous exit to the Kim Jong Un regime. Those in favour of an
Indo-Pacific strategy towards the Korean crisis ask that China be asked
“to curtail its shipments of essential materials to the DPRK”, so that
Pyongyang has a bigger incentive to come to a settlement during the
window of a little over three years before Kim Jong Un has a nuclear
bomb and missile system capable of threatening the west coast of the US.
The period ahead is likely to see “intense pressure on China to cut
back on its assistance to North Korea” and thereby “join the rest of the
international community in refusing to assist the DPRK, until it
surrenders its nuclear ambitions”.

The Atlanticists have confidence that Beijing will cooperate in the
tough measures needed to persuade Pyongyang to surrender its weapons,
while the Indo-Pacific theorists are more sceptical, with some even
raising the possibility of Chinese assistance to North Korea to defend
itself against a US attack. However, such assistance would rupture most
ties with the US “and would be an international catastrophe”. The clock
is ticking on North Korea and its nuclear weapons program, the outer
limit for a pre-emptive strike being around three years from now, with
several (especially those sceptical of negotiations offering any hope of
transformation) advising action “much sooner”. All are agreed that (1)
China needs to join hands with its major trading partners in sharply
cutting back on its power, fuel and other shipments to the DPRK. This
would help create a climate conducive to serious negotiations. Also (2)
should Kim Jong Un decline within a defined time period to surrender his
nuclear weapons, a pre-emptive strike against him becomes inevitable.
This needs to be devastating enough to prevent a response other than a
weak riposte that would hold down the level of South Korean casualties
to below 5,000.

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About Prof. MD Nalapat

Prof. Madhav Das Nalapat (aka MD Nalapat or Monu Nalapat), holds the UNESCO Peace Chair and is Director of the Department of Geopolitics at Manipal University, India. The former Coordinating Editor of the Times of India, he writes extensively on security, policy and international affairs. Prof. Nalapat has no formal role in government, although he is said to influence policy at the highest levels. @MDNalapat

MD Nalapat's anthology 'Indutva' (1999)

In 1999, Har-Anand published Indutva an anthology of MD Nalapat's 1990s columns from the Times of India. The individual columns are posted here, in 1998 and 1999 of the blog archive, though the exact dates of publication are uncertain.